Email Archiving. . .  Once a Good Idea, Now a Necessity

For companies under the jurisdiction of HIPAA, SEC, SOX, or any of the other alphabet soup regulations, email is considered “work product” and must be retained and protected from misuse or theft. But even if you’re not under the government’s microscope via one of these regulations, you should still be concerned about email archiving.

Email archiving is now mandatory

FRCP – The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are a set of recently revised rules for managing civil suits in all US District courts and in thirty-five state courts that require you to archive your e-mail (with no exceptions for company size, organizational structure or non-profit status). The rules are specific, non-negotiable, and apply to email generated and received by the business, its customers and vendors. If you sue or get sued in civil court, you may win or lose your case based on your compliance with the procedures regarding email archiving.

HIPAA – Safeguarding the privacy and security of patient information is not limited to clinics and healthcare providers anymore. Any organization that sends, receives or stores paper and electronic personal health information (PHI) must comply with this legislation. A recent survey revealed that compliance failure is around 50%.

SOX – The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 states that all public companies and their accounting firms must securely retain all business records, including electronic records and messages, for not less than five years. Failure results in fines and imprisonment.

Email archiving actually keeps you up and running

Just a few years ago, the average size of a user’s mail box was 10MB. Today the average is 50x larger(500MB)! This causes many servers in small businesses to overload, slowing down speed and performance dramatically. While 1/3 of this bloat contains unwanted messages that should be deleted, the remainder needs to be retained, searchable and available on demand. Most mail server software has built-in features that simply move “old” email off the server to another location, but doesn’t allow for easy access to the information. You can also buy bigger server hard drives every year to prevent a bog-down, but this becomes cost prohibitive. More often than not, email archiving is the most effective and economical choice for retaining messages and staying compliant with regulations.

Call Before August 31st For A Free Mail Server Audit!

We will send a network engineer to your office to evaluate your email system. Using this information we will generate an action plan for your specific email storage, retrieval and compliance requirements and bring you into the 21st century with our email archival system. It keeps your mail server up and running fast, ensures compliance with government regulations and gives you rapid searchable access to archived data, saving you time and money. We take great pride in giving you peace of mind knowing you are ready when government inspectors knock on your door or a process server delivers a lawsuit to your office.